


Circumstantial Victims

by spaceleviathan



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 14:12:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1553249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceleviathan/pseuds/spaceleviathan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha found him by accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circumstantial Victims

Natasha found him by accident.

She meant that sincerely: she stumbled across him without inclination to track him down, because even though she knew the files by heart, even though she’d scoured through whatever she could find about Sergeant Bucky Barnes, she had meant what she told Steve when she said she wanted to find someone new to be. Tracking down a man who had more issues than she did was not on her priority list; not when Sam and Steve were doing that for her.

Her journey of self-discovery could have gone down any path, but after only a few days she knew that her first stop was Clint. It always had been. He found her, he believed in her, and she relied on him. She was also furious at him.

She didn’t wait in Washington for him to show his sheepish face with a cup of coffee and a half-assed excuse. Natasha trod a silent trail across the country, keeping her head down and her makeup misleading, pulled up her hair and picked at her nails all the way to New York. She could have asked Stark for a private plane; he was overwhelmed by the Avengers, a maladjusted child who never grew up and who wanted his new playmates close, but she also needed time to think. Tony needed time to think. The secrets were out, and he’d just learned his parents had been murdered.

She wound up outside of Clint’s apartment block, and suddenly she didn’t know what to say. She chewed on her lip and flexed her fists, as if she could fight her way out of the situation. She didn’t deny a few thrown punches would ease her nerves, as she couldn’t repress the anger that Clint had ignored her calls: _SHIELD is compromised and we need help. Clint, they’re trying to kill Captain America. Clint, they’re trying to kill_ me _._

A neighbour was staring at her from the window, and Natasha made a bland gesture. There were suspicious looks here, because the spy knew these people had been through the kind of situations which only came from living in a dodgy area with dodgy landlords, especially if you threw in a SHIELD-employed spy-assassin-Avenger to mix. For a moment, Natasha stood still and stunned, sick to her stomach, wondering if HYDRA was deeper than she ever thought it could be.

And then she was breaking into Clint’s apartment, looking around and shaking her head free of doubt. He wasn’t there, but he showed no signs of anything more than having been sent on an extended mission. With his luck, he probably wouldn’t hear about what had happened to SHIELD, to the world, until he got home. Or, potentially, if whatever cover he had was blown by the secrets Natasha had spilled online. She’d apologise when he got back, after they had parried and argued and yelled and clung onto violence like affection.

She sat in the empty room and wished he was there. She closed her eyes and listened to the TV, letting Dog Cops play one after the other. They’d been set to record whilst he was away, and Natasha intended to watch them all again with the archer when he got back.

He didn’t come back that week. She tried to contact him on a Wednesday, and then again on the Friday, and then it was two weeks and she still hadn’t heard from him. Anxiety gnawed at her until she spoke to Hill, now working at Stark Industries, and Hill didn’t seem as worried.

In the end, as usual, it was Steve Rogers who calmed her nerves.

“He’ll be fine.” Cap said when she rang Sam Wilson on a secure line. Sam joked, “We can try looking for him too if you want.” They hadn’t had any luck, and Natasha knew she wouldn’t either if she tried to track down Hawkeye.

She felt lonely for the first time since she was a child when they hung up and she was left in a flat that wasn’t hers, surrounded by people she didn’t know, dealing with problems involving gangsters which were not her responsibility. She took up whatever mantle had been left regardless, because Clint had refused Stark’s offer for a reason, and his reason was the people he protected in the little block of apartments he owned. Natasha could sometimes step up to be the Avenger she was heralded, if only for Clint Barton.

That loneliness was short-lived, and it was not killed by the timely arrival of the purple-clad Avenger; by contrast, she had been distracted with the depressing black and silvers of a completely different assassin. He had let himself in whilst Natasha had stepped out, and she didn’t even break the eggs when she hastily put aside her groceries and focused on the soldier casting shadows across the kitchen-lounge.

His eyes were empty, and Natasha had seen that look before. In the mirror, more often than not. She said: “Steve Rogers is looking for you.”

The soldier kept quiet, but there was no indication of surprise or anger at the declaration, and he was much too clever to not already know. He watched her for a long time, shoulders back and stance steady, like he expected to be attacked. Natasha knew she was unreadable, especially since she herself wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, and it was reasonable that he’d err on the side of caution. Black Widow might not be the ghost story that was the Winter Soldier, but now that her past had been unveiled she was hardly someone he would overlook. He would know everything about her by now, especially if he was willingly standing silent in her chosen rooms.

It took her a long time to decide she would only hurt him if he hurt her first. He didn’t react when she suddenly moved towards the coffee maker, but his posture shifted. He felt less at threat, he looked less of a threat, and he took the mug when Natasha slid over a cup of Clint’s crappy joe. The machine was long broken, and she hadn’t gotten round to fixing it either. She made do.

She told him, “You can’t stay here.” She thought about the single mother who lived downstairs with her curious children, or the girl with the bright hair who eyed her but smiled when they passed in the corridors. She thought about the garden on the roof, the barbeques which had started to pick up after a mourning period, and she thought about the Winter Soldier in the middle of it all. She thought about his history, she thought about her own, and she re-evaluated the wisdom in staying where so many people could be at risk.

“What if HYDRA finds you?” She said. She said, “What if HYDRA finds me?” She had been so focused on Clint’s absence that this was the first time she’d really considered her own presence. She’d told people her name, and a few of them recognised her, but no one had really said anything. She’d said she was Clint’s friend, and it was easier when they spotted her necklace. They liked him, they trusted him, and they extended a tentative olive branch when she had tried to fight off her solitude by mingling.

The Winter Soldier sat down when she did, taking a seat opposite her over the low plains of the glass coffee table. She had moved an armchair deliberately so they could face each other, and behind her head she was aware of Clint’s favourite bow on the wall. She knew she wouldn’t win in a fight to the death with the Winter Soldier, but she also knew she was the better archer, even if only because he’d never been trained for it.

She remembered Clint’s gentle hands as he explained the strength of the bow, his palms dry as they curled around her knuckles. Together they drew back the string, and together they hit a target in the left eye. He had smiled against her ear as she had huffed with satisfaction.

If Clint ever came against him for long-range weaponry Natasha wouldn’t know who to bet on. Potentially, though it felt like a betrayal to say it, she might put her money on the man with the gun.

He had yet to speak, and she didn’t bother to prompt him. They stayed silent and spied on each other out of the corner of their eyes. The night wore on, and neither of them moved. He didn’t tire easily, and she was too well-trained. It was early morning by the time his coffee had staled in his cup, and likewise the last dregs of her own had become inconsumable.

In the name of safety, not necessarily their own, she told him, “We both need to leave,” but she didn’t want to, and he had come here for a reason.

She left him on his own in the early morning when the sun was rising and cars started to sound across the roads. He had made no indication he wished to move, and she had ensured he knew she was not going to pre-emptively strike. She found him again, mid-afternoon, and he had laid out lengthways on the floor behind the couch, closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and never fallen asleep.

There was something easy about the companionship, though it also set her teeth on edge. She couldn’t differentiate whether it was her own wellbeing or the security of the other residents that kept her wary, but it satisfied something vindictive inside her to know that he was equally as on guard. She doubted there was ever a time, however, when he wasn’t.

That didn’t mean he overtly kept his guard up; he wasn’t a constant mess of glares and posturing, but then he didn’t have to. Natasha could read the paranoia etched across the statue-still lines of his muscles, and the steady movement of his flesh-arm. If she attacked him, he didn’t have to be ready; as Banner was always angry, a moment’s notice away from green and dangerous, so too was the Winter Soldier. Natasha was well-versed in the training of the Red Room, and agents acted on instinct rather than training. Fear and fury and suspicion meant that they’d kill before thinking; startling the Winter Soldier would mean sacrificing several lives. Natasha couldn’t quite get a read on his mental state, but when he emerged from that haze he’d find himself surrounded by blood and bodies before he realised what had happened.

Natasha knew this better than she’d have liked.

She ate, offered him something, and when he didn’t answer she passed a plate forward. He pushed food from one side of the dish to the other, and ate a total of two bites. She took it off him again, and he seemed more comfortable when another burning cup ended up in his hands and they were situated face-to-face again.

She said, “He’s going to find you,” and his expression once again said nothing, because he already knew.

“Do you know who you are?” She asked, but was met, predictably, with silence. She watched his eyebrows furrow, but didn’t expect anything.

He said, suddenly, when his drink had grown cold and started to congeal: “I’m not ready.”

Their conversations were taking form of statements they both already knew. There was not enough evidence to suggest that the Winter Soldier knew himself, knew his past, remembered the truth that had been repeatedly taken from him, but it was clear to them both that if the assassin was anything it was unstable. He wasn’t ready for talking, he wasn’t ready for remembering, and he wasn’t ready for Steve. But in visiting Natasha he had done something immense: he had taken a step forward, though Natasha wasn’t convinced it was in the right direction.

“You know me.” She said. To this, he nodded. She told him, “We’re not going to bond over life-experiences,” and perhaps he smiled, or perhaps he winced.

Again, she said, “We need to leave,” and again neither of them said anything more. He would appear wherever she was, because he was at Clint’s only because so was she. She knew he’d follow her, and knew it would be safer for everyone if she left right now. But she didn’t, because perhaps Clint would be home tomorrow.

They slept again, and in the morning she found him exactly where he had been that afternoon, only this time the sleep was genuine.

When they moved into the early hours the next day, this time together, it was because there was a gang wearing tracksuits outside, yelling in Russian and Lithuanian, saying unrepeatable things about Clint. The Winter Soldier watched the commotion from the living room, and Natasha glared out the other road-facing window.

For a while she waited for them to leave, but time etched by faster than she realised, so used to standing still and silent for elongated periods that she hardly noticed her own immobility. Not quite besides her, the Winter Soldier had unconsciously echoed her stance, or vice versa. Or neither, since children of the Red Room were never truly unalike. 

After a while, and a threatening toss of a rock at a window below them, the Winter Soldier moved his gaze critically to her. She scowled at him accusingly.

Natasha went to the corridor and saw a small, worried crowd on the other side. One of them tried to peer in, asking, “Where’s Clint?” She spotted the line of the Winter Soldier’s back and frowned, whilst Natasha tried to divert attention by stepping out of the flat and closing the door.

She made her way down to the entrance, where she demanded to know what they expected her to do. They said some angry words, made a few threats, but one or two narrowed their eyes at her and backed off when she stepped forward. They were gone when Natasha suggested they leave, and inside waited a set of stunned, thankful faces. She didn’t appreciate their relief, because this was not the end.

The Winter Soldier was still looking outside when she came back in, eyes narrowed as he glared down the side streets. When she asked if they were gone, he huffed. It might have been laughter.

\--

It was Thursday and her guest assassin had appeared on Monday. There had been more silence and stillness than there had been talking and movement, and with the usual company she kept Natasha was choosing to see it as a refreshing change. She had caught him thumbing the spines of Clint’s bookcase, and recognised the desperation in his face when he’d spotted a Captain America title which Clint had bought in jest as soon as Steve had been rediscovered in 2011.

“You know that he blames himself.” He had to know, so she told him. She watched the soldier from across the coffee table as he sat down and stared into his mug, and she knew she’d succeeded in whatever she was doing when his jaw clenched. He looked up, and she looked down.

\--

Friday, and the goons were back, tossing rocks at the right apartment this time. Natasha glared at the scratches on the glass, because this wasn’t her house and Clint would be less than impressed to see how she’d treated his home. Behind her, the Winter Soldier made his hands busy with buttering toast and brewing tea. The _clunk, clunk_ of rock on reinforced glass punctuated each easy swipe of the dull knife, and Natasha turned away to watched him as she so often did, curious and waiting for him to finally give her a reason to not call Steve and give his location over to the one man who’d do the right thing with that information.

He bit into the toast, and a heavy stone made a loud impact on the window, startling neither of them. The Winter Soldier’s eyes met hers. Someone knocked on the door.

“We’re not ignoring this,” She said, and he stopped dead, relaxing like she had given him a mission.

She locked the door behind her, and met three faces down the hallway. One was little, another was his mother, and the final one was a man who lived two doors down from them. They said, “Is it them again?” and “Where’s Clint?”

“Leave it to us,” she replied, as the door opened again. A lock was only a lock to normal people, and the Winter Soldier neglected to acknowledge company as he slipped passed them all and headed towards the staircase. The three followed him with their eyes, but didn’t speak. They looked back to Natasha expectantly and didn’t even assume. Clint’s taste in friends was often varied, but never insincere.

Outside, she had no bow and arrow or broad shoulders to set herself up as a threat. She had tied her hair back before breakfast, was proud in the purple t-shirt she had donned for lounging around in the eerie calm silence of the flat, and her feet were hardly battle-ready in a pair of black and red converse.

They fell silent when they saw her, and at their forefront was a moustachioed leader, with a cheery face and stilted English. She replied in Russian, wary of little ears only a wall away, and he responded politely, if insistently. When she refused to move from the door or give up Clint’s location (not here, but they had no need to know that), he became more aggressive, moving forward with a baseball bat, and Natasha had a gun aimed between his eyes before he could cock it to swing.

Goons had guns too, and Natasha was never ignorant of the fact. They would also be less careful with the trigger, nervous and sweaty and idiotic as they were. So she had a back-up plan, and it performed beautifully without needing instruction.

Three shots took three down, and none of them were fatal. Gang-leader Ivan Banionis looked up towards the roof to see the unkempt hair of a man with nothing to lose, and then the reckless leap of a creature so far out of his league it wouldn’t even make a good punchline. There were residents peeking out from behind their blinds, and they gasped when the Winter Soldier streaked passed them as he jumped straight over the roof, landing heavy and denting the pavement.

Like her, he was underprepared. He was wearing an Iron Man t-shirt which was a size too small, and his feet were bare. His eyes were sleep-lined and blackened with erratic insomnia, and he should have posed as much threat as a frustrated kitten. As it were, his glower and prowl as he came into line with Natasha made her re-evaluate her own intimidation tactics, had her wondering how best to ask a traumatised assassin for pointers.

Banionis wasn’t an idiot, but he also had an agenda, and there were still a number of his men standing around and looking to him. Natasha and the Winter Soldier were outnumbered, and presumably outmatched. But where a mission was a mission to the gang-leader, a mission was a lot more to the two ex-weapons who stood marked by the red in their hair and on their shoulders and in their hearts and on their ledgers. A mission was everything, and a head-count was the same as a hit-list.

Sergeant Bucky Barnes had been a sniper, and so too was the Winter Soldier famous for his abilities behind a long-range weapon. But he was also good at Natasha’s style of combat: personal, almost too close to move, and with a dagger in hand too close was an unfavourable position for targets to be in. Natasha wasn’t above using sex appeal, and the Winter Soldier wasn’t above using intimidation to press in closer, freezing a victim with fear.

When three men attacked him at once, they didn’t manage to touch him. Natasha took two down in a breath, and was left staring at Banionis as the Winter Soldier dispatched the last of his, pocketed one of their knives, and the mask of Iron Man heaved on his chest with each steady breath.

Ivan Banionis chose his battles well, and this was one he was not willing to test his luck against. He’d come back again, but hopefully when Clint was around to beat up instead.

The Winter Soldier kicked his victims down the front steps and left them on the sidewalk. He wiped his bare feet before he stepped inside the apartment block again. Natasha suggested at least socks next time.

The three from before stepped towards them, and both assassins side-stepped. Natasha smiled whilst the Winter Soldier did not, turning the door handle with his left arm, snapping something from inside.

He left it to Natasha to fix it, or call someone who would. The landlord wasn’t around to do his job, so she tried her luck with a screwdriver. All the time, her guest never once offered to help, though he did make her coffee on demand, and at lunchtime they ate ham sandwiches.

\--

It was Saturday and neither of them had left. They didn’t dare to now, what with a tracksuit gang waiting outside to pounce. HYDRA was a distant enemy when they didn’t come knocking on doors or swing baseball bats at their heads. The world slowed, and Natasha let it go by as she waited for Clint and watched the Winter Soldier slow with it.

He didn’t speak, but she didn’t want him to. He ran his hands over weapons he had kept hold of, and she ensured there was something offensive in reach at all times. Neither begrudged each other the instinct, because it was semi-conscious more than aware, and sometimes their eyes would glaze as they went through the daily grind, because everything was mediocre and maudlin without a mission, and their bodies were not trained for the lift of a tin or the gentle closing of doors.

Natasha was learning she wasn’t a lot underneath the lies. The Winter Soldier seemed to be realising likewise. He wanted to be, as much as she did, and both had been told by the same man that there was something hiding, waiting to be found, beneath their skin.

Neither had discovered anything yet, but then neither knew what they were looking for. They didn’t see the world in the same blue, white and red shades as Captain America, and so it was difficult to use his perspective and find what he had seen. Natasha had waited for something to crawl out from her stomach like puking up a revelation, but all she had been left with was an amnesiac on a couch that wasn’t hers. They drank coffee and didn’t talk, and closed their eyes, and didn’t know whether they wanted to find themselves at all if it meant this quiet.

\--

Sunday, and it marked the occasion of the Winter Soldier speaking. They’d had no interruptions for two days, and the silence was a series of shuffles and clinking cups and running water and the wafting scent of vegetables and daffodils.

The TV was switched off at the plug, this week’s episode of Dog Cops had been lost to the ages, because the red light made both of them hyper-aware of the other. Natasha had been aware of him when he stepped up towards the kitchen and said, “I read your file.”

“I read yours,” she returned, and his face didn’t split with caution or anger any more than hers did.  She said, since she couldn’t seem to help herself, “You can’t be blamed for things you only had so much knowledge about-“

“Stop,” he ordered, and like a soldier she did. A superior officer looked down on her, and she blinked and he was a man with lank hair and dead eyes. His frown was darkened by the beard on his chin.

She had found herself surrounded by men who wanted to blame themselves. They wanted to take responsibility when no one else would let them, and this was hardly different. The programming was deeper than even ideologies; it took a person and made them the programming, and if the programming was self-destructive then so too was the agent. They called the Winter Soldier the Asset; the greatest of their successes, so perfectly malleable. He was a hero to them because he was not in the least autonomous. Natasha had always been too wild, even at her most tame, and put against the Winter Soldier she had been anarchic by comparison.

He sat across from her now, thinking for himself for the first time since 1945, and what he thought was that he had to shoulder his burdens alone. He thought as Stark thought, or as Clint thought, or even as Steve did. When Steve had found out about his friend’s continued life, he had almost tripped over himself in his haste to rip a new self-inflicted wound to pile all that blame into. Blindly, she had stopped him before he’d let the thought sink in. Blindly, she did the same to the man who might still be Bucky Barnes.

She said, “It’s not your fault.”

He said, her number well in hand, “Do you say that to the mirror, too?”

 _What good would that do_ , she didn’t reply. The mirror had nothing to say back but to echo empty sentiments and to stare at her as she stared at it. She had tried before, because she knew the extent of her own control. It hadn’t worked.

The Winter Soldier knew the extent of his own control, and it hadn’t worked for him either. Yet, he still frowned at her when she had spoken of something like forgiveness, like acceptance, like he didn’t need to step forward and manually scrub at that which wasn’t his to clean. HYDRA would answer for what he didn’t need to, but his innards hadn’t allowed it any more than Natasha’s had allowed her to do the same. Yet, now he sat back for the first time, and eased his shoulders along the soft line of the sofa.

He said, meeting her eyes, echoing with a tongue that spoke her language and a face that had seen and caused countless sleepless nights, “It’s not your fault.”

He had been right; she said it to a mirror. A reflection. A visage of herself, an internal figure who dressed like a child and wept like a casualty. She had tried to say it, because she knew it was true, at least to an extent. She took jobs from SHIELD which petrified any morality mid-growth, she killed men and women in the name of a cause or a man or a woman she believed in, and she slept well at night because of the trust she had in those above her or beside her. What haunted her was the nightmare an archer had to drag her screaming out of, and he had almost died with the attempt to bring her away from a life she had never wanted to live. She didn’t thank him for a long time, because she could not forgive him and she could not forgive herself.

She looked at the Winter Soldier, the Asset himself, and she shook her head. It shouldn’t have taken so little, but they were the same and not at all alike, and no child of the Red Room was unlike the next.

She sat back in the arm chair, for the first time.

**Author's Note:**

> Sooo Winter Soldier got its teeth into me, and someone was talking about how supportive Natasha was and how she totally needed to have someone tell her that too. That someone should not be Bucky Barnes. Nope, that's a bad idea.


End file.
